fltk-rs VS egui

I have added a tile example to the repo, it's based on the FLTK example.

fltk-accesskit is an accesskit integration crate for fltk-rs, the gui crate. It's implemented as an external crate to allow for more experimentation before stabilizing the api, especially since fltk is at version 1.4.

fltk-rs worked well for me, for a small app.

Gtk doesn’t require you to write xml, you can write your gui code in Rust. You also have https://github.com/fltk-rs/fltk-rs

Currently, I have narrowed potential libraries to: 1. Flutter 2. FLTK 3. Relm (GTK) 4. iced 5. Slint 6. Imgui, Imgui-rs 7. and gtk-rs

FLTK

The fltk-rs library provides Rust bindings for the FLTK toolkit. The fltk-rs crate supports old architecture with more than 80 customizable widgets and more than four supported theme schemes, including the GTK scheme. You can also use the fltk-theme crate for more customizations.

A friend of mine grew tired of plotting libraries that did not allow adding data points to his plot interactively like you can in Matlab, so he wrote one using FLTK using C++. I refactored his code a bit and then ported to Rust using the fltk-rs crate. Recently I needed this library for a project and I noticed I had not made it publicly available on Github. So I present to you the fltk-plot library!

fltk-rs is a Rust bindings crate for FLTK, the cross-platfrom & lightweight gui library.

Besides GTK I can recommend FLTK. It has been around for a long time and is very stable.

Thanks for the feedback!

It is definitely fixable. Take a look at https://github.com/emilk/egui/issues/996 for some examples of how others have styled egui, or try out https://app.rerun.io/

Styling is done with `ctx.set_style`, but creating a nice style isn't very easy at the moment (basically you'll have to tweak constants in code, and then recompile). I'm working on making it easier as we speak though!

Nothing is wrong with that, it’s rather a workaround, ultimately I am trying to have one language only including the UI too (been playing with egui),so I don’t have to use JavaScript.

https://github.com/emilk/egui

FWIW, I opened an issue: https://github.com/emilk/egui/issues/4046

That's fair. I don't have experience with other immediate mode libraries. It's good to hear that it's not an intrinsic limitation

https://github.com/emilk/egui?tab=readme-ov-file#layout Here the author discusses the issue directly. They note that there are solutions to the issue, but that they all come with (in their opinion) significant drawbacks.

For my use case, if I have to do a lot of manual work to achieve what I consider behavior that should be handled by the framework, then I don't find that compelling and am inclined to use a retained mode implementation.

It totally depends on what IoT and what purpose, for example:

IIoT/PLC/industrial automation: most likely you will have to use vendors software, most if the time it’s crap, and a mix of several tech stacks like MSSQL/C#/C++

Sensors and such: depends on what are you building or using the sensors: the protocol mostly is MQTT, and if you would store it in a db postrrsql, elasticsearch, surreldb, influxdb among the most I used.

Robots/drones: on what I build, I use protobuf/grpc for performance and cross-language and direct linux socket io, and where needed websocket but mostly for any web interaction rather than the protocol itself. The tech stack for those, the embedded side is up to you or sometimes based on the sdk you are dealing with, the backend/frontend however, I used to use go/nodejs and for frontend svelte or a simple js library/framework, but recently I’m shifting and redoing everything in rust, embedded, backend and frontend (using something like egui https://github.com/emilk/egui).

When it comes to IoT, I try as much as possible to stay away from python unless you are scripting something else done in go/c++/rust, look at python as a glorified bash script, it’s useful for that or other data science work, but not in IoT.

Same goes with other tech you mentioned, it might suit one case but not another, for example, MQTT is good for sensor IoT type, but good luck controlling a drone with it, mongodb might be great to store a fleet of robots with its access credentials and such, but if you try to use it to store realtime data, it might not perform as expected, and so on.

AFAIK the Rust equivalent to C++'s Dear ImGui is egui.

The creator of Rerun (Emil Ernerfeldt) also created egui [1], an immediate GUI library for Rust. The library is similar to Dear ImGui but it is written in Rust and can be used for desktop and web apps (compiles to WASM and uses WebGL, demo [2]). Desktop apps can target OpenGL (does not display correct colors on macOS, does not work in VirtualBox on Windows) or WGPU (uses native APIs for each platform, works without any problems, but the binary is a big larger).

[1] https://github.com/emilk/egui

> [...] you can build UIs that are snappy and keyboard driven.

That's not an advantage that is exclusive to TUIs; after all, you're running your TUI inside a graphical application that emulates a terminal. (Unless you're rocking an actual VT102, in which case I bow down to you.)

In fact there's an entire class of applications that are extremely snappy and keyboard driven, by their very nature: games.

Some people have taken to writing GUI apps like you'd write a game, and the effects range from OK to fantastic. Check out Lagrange (https://gmi.skyjake.fi/lagrange/), AppManager (https://tildegit.org/solene/AppManager), Dear ImGUI (https://github.com/ocornut/imgui), egui (https://github.com/emilk/egui), and many others.

Honestly, frontend development especially with all these crowded frameworks and libraries always confused me so pardon my ignorance, which is why in a project I’m working on right now I’m trying not to use js, instead I’m using egui [1]

Zola is a static site generator and it’s crazy fast, using one binary only [2], also there’s Blades [3], same concept but supposedly faster, never tried it though.

[1] https://github.com/emilk/egui

[2] https://www.getzola.org

[3] https://getblades.org